Current Trends in Distributed Databases

Current Trends in Distributed Databases

Current trends in distributed data management are centered on the Internet, in which petabytes of data can be managed in a scalable, dynamic, and reliable fashion. Two important areas in this direction are cloud computing and peer-to-peer data-bases.

1. Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the paradigm of offering computer infrastructure, platforms, and software as services over the Internet. It offers significant economic advantages by limiting both up-front capital investments toward computer infrastructure as well as total cost of ownership. It has introduced a new challenge of managing petabytes of data in a scalable fashion. Traditional database systems for managing enterprise data proved to be inadequate in handling this challenge, which has resulted in a major architectural revision. The Claremont report by a group of senior database researchers envisions that future research in cloud computing will result in the emergence of new data management architectures and the interplay of structured and unstructured data as well as other developments.

Performance costs associated with partial failures and global synchronization were key performance bottlenecks of traditional database solutions. The key insight is that the hash-value nature of the underlying datasets used by these organizations lends itself naturally to partitioning. For instance, search queries essentially involve a recursive process of mapping keywords to a set of related documents, which can benefit from such a partitioning. Also, the partitions can be treated independently, thereby eliminating the need for a coordinated commit. Another problem with tra-ditional DDBMSs is the lack of support for efficient dynamic partitioning of data, which limited scalability and resource utilization. Traditional systems treated system metadata and application data alike, with the system data requiring strict consistency and availability guarantees. But application data has variable requirements on these characteristics, depending on its nature. For example, while a search engine can afford weaker consistency guarantees, an online text editor like Google Docs, which allows concurrent users, has strict consistency requirements.

The metadata of a distributed database system should be decoupled from its actual data in order to ensure scalability. This decoupling can be used to develop innovative solutions to manage the actual data by exploiting their inherent suitability to partitioning and using traditional database solutions to manage critical system metadata. Since metadata is only a fraction of the total data set, it does not prove to be a performance bottleneck. Single object semantics of these implementations enables higher tolerance to nonavailability of certain sections of data. Access to data is typically by a single object in an atomic fashion. Hence, transaction support to such data is not as stringent as for traditional databases. There is a varied set of cloud services available today, including application services (salesforce.com), stor-age services (Amazon Simple Storage Service, or Amazon S3), compute services (Google App Engine, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud—Amazon EC2), and data services (Amazon SimpleDB, Microsoft SQL Server Data Services, Google’s Datastore). More and more data-centric applications are expected to leverage data services in the cloud. While most current cloud services are data-analysis intensive, it is expected that business logic will eventually be migrated to the cloud. The key challenge in this migration would be to ensure the scalability advantages for multi-ple object semantics inherent to business logic. For a detailed treatment of cloud computing, refer to the relevant bibliographic references in this chapter’s Selected Bibliography.

2. Peer-to-Peer Database Systems

A peer-to-peer database system (PDBS) aims to integrate advantages of P2P (peer-to-peer) computing, such as scalability, attack resilience, and self-organization, with the features of decentralized data management. Nodes are autonomous and are linked only to a small number of peers individually. It is permissible for a node to behave purely as a collection of files without offering a complete set of traditional DBMS functionality. While FDBS and MDBS mandate the existence of mappings between local and global federated schemas, PDBSs attempt to avoid a global schema by providing mappings between pairs of information sources. In PDBS, each peer potentially models semantically related data in a manner different from other peers, and hence the task of constructing a central mediated schema can be very challenging. PDBSs aim to decentralize data sharing. Each peer has a schema associated with its domain-specific stored data. The PDBS constructs a semantic path of mappings between peer schemas. Using this path, a peer to which a query has been submitted can obtain information from any relevant peer connected through this path. In multidatabase systems, a separate global query processor is used, whereas in a P2P system a query is shipped from one peer to another until it is processed completely. A query submitted to a node may be forwarded to others based on the mapping graph of semantic paths. Edutella and Piazza are examples of PDBSs. Details of these systems can be found from the sources mentioned in this chapter’s Selected Bibliography.